But I can’t stop thinking about it—how she figured Corrine out. How she found the thread that unraveled everything.
“How’d you know?” I ask. “How’d you figure her out?”
She walks to the sideboard, unhurried as always, and pours herself a glass of water like this is any other Monday.
“Corrine’s last name at birth was Lachlan,” she says. “After her father was murdered—and her mother almost was—she got adopted by some distant relatives upstate after she killed your mother.”
She takes a sip.
“That’s when she became Ashwood. New name, new records, new life.”
I blink. “You found all that?”
“Once I had the right last name?” She shrugs. “A lot of doors opened.”
She turns toward me, casual as sin. “Plus, I broke into her house and stole some things. Not to incriminate myself or anything.”
Dante lets out a quiet laugh, shaking his head.
Eve continues, unfazed. “The newspaper clippings she kept weren’t about you, by the way. They were about your father.”
My stomach knots—slow and cold.
“Obsessively so,” she adds. “Timelines. Quotes. Photos. She was still fixated on him. Even after all these years.”
“And the rest was Jaxon,” she says. “The drives were almost completely corrupted, but he worked a miracle—pulled just enough metadata to recover an old digital diary, partial surveillance files. It painted a full enough picture.”
Once Eve told us everything, Dante was insistent on scanning the camera’s of the office. He wanted to know what she had been up to these two weeks while we were trying to save our ass.
And it was nothing less than shocking.
The poisoned bottle she brought for me Friday. She was going to kill me. Get the last Harrow out of the way so she could be with my father.
That was her one true goal. Everything to get back to him.
“Well,” I say, breaking some tension by glancing out at the city for a beat, “at least she won’t be able to torment her mother anymore. If we can count one good thing coming out of this.”
I exhale—long and slow. My pulse roars in my ears, but it’s not panic. It’s release.
“There’s more than one good thing, in my book,” she says.
I turn toward Eve, not sure what to say. There’s no repayment for what she’s done. What she gave us back.
“I don’t think we could ever repay you,” I murmur. “For any of it.”
Eve smirks, still holding her water. “Don’t worry,” she says smoothly. “He paid me handsomely.”
She winks at Dante.
I raise a brow just as she reaches into her bag and slides something across the table to me. A matte-black card. I pick it up and it’s heavy in my palm.
Embossed in gold:
The Masquerade
Welcome to the Devil’s Playground
I turn it over, but it’s blank. “What is this?”
